Both Sides Now
by GoddessofSnark
Summary: He was optimistic once, when he was little, when he didn't know that the world was a cold and brutal place. But he really doesn't know life at all, but he's all right with that.
1. Rows and Flows of Angel Hair

A/N: I'm a prolific little bugger today, and it feels good. Inspired by the song Both Sides Now by Joanie Mitchell, and if you squint real hard you can piece together where the lyrics would fit, if it was a songfic proper. One chapter to a verse, three chapters total.

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There was a time when Gregory House had been optimistic once. It was a long, long time ago. When he was still at the age of not knowing any better, and just accepting that things were the way they were because. And because was a good enough answer for him. It would still be another year before "because why?" would become a constant part of his exasperating vocabulary, but for now, he was content.

And he thought that life couldn't get any better. He looked forward to warm summer days and popsicles, something that he damn near lived off of for most of his youth. He looked forward to being able to go outside, and play with the neighbor kids, or even just outside to his own playset that his father had built. He listened to his father's commands, and his mother's insistence that his father was acting the way he was because he wanted Greg to grow up big, strong, and perfect.

He didn't think there was anything wrong with the way his father raised him, but he wasn't yet old enough to know better. He didn't know that sleeping outside was a bad thing-even when it was cold out. He just took up refuge in his play house, and pretended he was camping somewhere, or on a ship in the middle of the sea, and that the storm would pass, and he'd get to go outside to a sunshining day.

And on warm summer nights, he'd lay out on the grass willingly, watching the sun dip down, and watch the clouds roll by, pointing out the shapes in them. Occasionally, his mother would join him. Angels, and ice cream cones, each shape shifting and metamorphing into another, as they gently blew by on the wind.

They'd given him hope as a child, they were something that were always there. Something that he could count on, that he knew he could always look up at. And he liked them, because they could be whatever he wanted them to be. If he wanted them to be a pirate, they'd be a pirate, if he wanted it to be a bunny, he just needed to squint and tilt his head, and he could make out the four legs and long floppy ears.

They were malleable constants, and he knew that wherever he went-no matter how many times he moved, every time he looked up, there the clouds would be, waiting for him to pick out some decoded message in them. And it was hilltops, and valleys, stations in Germany and Japan and the desert sands of Egypt, and his back yard back _home_ wherever that was, where he'd stare up at the sky and make the clouds whatever he wanted them to be.

Sometime between the age of four-endlessly optimistic about the world-and the age for 14-endlessly cynical about it-the clouds had faded away. He'd occasionally look up, but not be able to see anything. He'd keep trying to see the castles made of ice cream and sweets, the angels, the bunnies, the smiling, happy people.

He'd keep trying to be optimistic, tell himself that the next day would get better, that this was just a passing phase. Or that he'd grow up and move out, and all this would be done, and he'd never have to see his father again. He'd keep searching vainly for shapes in the clouds, that had always been there to comfort him, some sort of decoded sign that thing were going to be all right.

And occasionally, he'd sit staring at the clouds, even now, hoping to pick up some sort of shape, some sort of something to give him the hope he had in his youth. Somewhere along the way, the clouds had turned from something constant to something constantly _there. _Things that meant nothing good-they meant rain and snow, and miserable weather.

They became an excuse, so that he didn't have to do anything. "it's raining", or "it's snowing out" became excuses to stop him from doing something spontaneous. They became things to blame, to hate, rather than to look up at in glee.

He didn't know when the clouds had shifted from something good to something bad, he didn't know when he had lost that optimistic hope that always accompanies youth. And part of him wished he still had it, that maybe life with hope was better. And then he reminds himself that hope is for those that don't' see the reality of the world. That Nietzsche was right, hope was the worst of all evils, for it prolonged the torture of man.

But still, for some reason, he stood on the balcony of his office, staring up at the sky-and the big, fluffy white clouds, like the ones from his youth. Not the thick ones that he was so used to seeing, not the ugly clouds that hung over New Jersey, as though to blanket it permanently in dourness, but the big white ones that every child draws onto their pictures in school.

The sort that adults don't even notice anymore.

When Wilson comes out to join him, and ask what he's doing, he gives a small snort of laughter. "Cloud watching." Maybe, just maybe, he could see what the younger side of him did, the other side of him, that had long since been turned off and ignored. Maybe he could find hope in the clouds again.


	2. If You Care, Don't Let them Know

There was a time when Gregory House was happy to have been in love. When it was still new, when it was still fun. It was his first girlfriend, and he was fourteen. The cynical shell was just starting to form, but she had managed to penetrate it's thin crust. He wasn't quite used to shutting people out, not yet he wasn't.

Where every moment was magical, when all he wanted to do was sit there, and hold her hand, and give her a peck on the cheek, and act as though that was the most daring thing in the world. He wanted to be with her all the time, just to be with her. When every time they kissed, it was fireworks.

He used to think that love was the fireworks, the explosions, the highlights. He knows now that it's not, but when he was a teenager in love, that was all that had mattered to him. The fireworks, the explosions, the knowing that everything was perfect.

His first girlfriend had dumped him, and he'd hated the way he felt. His father called him weak when he moped for a week straight, and told him to grow up and be a man. Usually accompanied by a slap across the face when the tears would well up in his eyes, because _nobody_ understood him, least of all his girlfriend.

But he'd learned how to carefully put up the shell, brick by brick. The next two girlfriends had gone much the same way as the first. They'd managed to penetrate the not-quite thickened shell, because he thought that maybe if he had a girl to love him, he'd be fine. That maybe if he had a girlfriend, then everything would be better. That the fireworks, the highlights, that they would erase everything else.

The second two had also ended much as the first two. And that was when he went to college, and for the first time a man had hit on him. And he'd decided that maybe if he could just find someone to love him, regardless of gender, he'd be fine, but this time he was the one doing the pushing away, because he learned that just because he mocked social norms, not everyone did, and he wasn't going to be with someone who was going to hide who he was.

That one had hurt, but it had felt so much better to be the one doing the pushing away. He'd worked on it, built up the shell around him, brick by brick, with every person to come in and out of his life, he built another brick up in the stone wall that was forming around him. He'd already learned that no one wanted to be with him forever.

So instead, he learned how to con them. To make them think that they wanted nothing more-because if they wanted something more, that meant exposing himself, letting them through the wall. Acted as though he didn't care. It became a game to him, a show. To see how many different people he could juggle, but all of them knowing that he didn't care.

Stacy had changed that, but just like everyone else he'd let through the wall, she'd betrayed him, and he swore off ever letting anyone through again. Every time he had, they left him with one feeling-rejection. And every time, he stood strong, and pretended it didn't matter, because he wasn't weak, he was a man, and he was damn proud of it. It was just a relationship.

Nobody still understood him, but he didn't let it show. Occasionally when it got to be too much, he'd pop a vicodin, and if the tears still started to well, he found himself slapping himself hard across the jaw, reminding himself to snap out of it, that it didn't matter, it was just another girl, just another boy, just another someone who didn't matter, because that someone wasn't him.

He didn't understand love, and he didn't want to. He and love were strangers-the closest thing he had to love was Wilson, and he supposed that Wilson was the closest thing to having a biological sibling. They shared movies, went out for dinner, and looked out for each other, just like any brothers did. And brotherly love was not real love, real love scared him. Then again, one fears what they do not understand.


	3. Life's Illusions I Recall

There was a time when Gregory House hadn't felt like the world was ending around him. He remembered when three words meant something good-that they were a declaration of an emotion he was proud to feel, because it justified his place in the world He was a human being, capable of emotions, and therefore, he was happy to be in love.

The three words had twisted into something to be afraid of, because they inevitably meant that something bad would happen. Not immediately, not right away, but they meant that he'd find himself in a bad spot sometime in the future. Because admitting he could love was admitting he could be hurt, and eventually, everyone hurt him.

He remembered a time when life was worth living, when it was enjoyable to be alive. When each day didn't feel like another chore to get up in the morning. When all he had was his dreams, and his dreams were all that mattered. But now, he'd reached the top-there was nowhere else for him to go-not anywhere he wanted to go at least.

He didn't want to go further up the food chain. He'd reached where he wanted to be. He had nothing left to hope for, to dream for. There wasn't any next step. Unless he had a case, he was bored to death, as there was nothing to challenge him anymore. There was no more reason to still be alive.

And yet, through sheer force of will, he was. He'd considered suicide multiple times, but never really tried to follow through. He'd done things that should have killed him, but there was always a saftey net. When he washed down the bottle of oxys with a bottle of bourbon, he knew Wilson would check on him, save him. When he decided to stick a knife in a lightsocket, he had made sure someone would find him. He never really wanted to die.

It was his trying to spite the world. If the world drove him to the point of wanting to kill himself, he wouldn't, just because he refused to do anything that anyone-much less the whole world wanted him to do. He didn't really want to live, but he absolutely refused to die until the world gave in and took him. He wouldn't give himself up.

He had seen the world once, through a child's eyes, but cartwheels had turned to car wheels, and he had grown up. Learned that the world was not a good place, or a kind place. He remembered reading Hemingway in school, and the impact it had had on him. The world broke everyone. There were two truths to life, the world breaks everyone, and everybody lies. Taxes could be evaded, death could be cheated-however briefly. Technically, death could be avoided forever. So long as oxygen pumped through ventilators, so long as they had something pumping through their veins, technically they were still alive.

But everybody lied. No matter how small-often very large. Everyone had something that was untrue, but part of their public face. The blonde, who had dyed her hair for so long, and kept it so meticulously, who everyone believes is natural, because they've never seen her any other way, and she doesn't argue it. The teenager, who pretended to smoke to be with his friends, to fit in, but doesn't actually inhale. Everybody lied. And everybody was broken by the world, because the world was a cold, cruel place that hated everyone indifferently.

He hadn't always thought that. He had been a child once too, captivated by the world around him. He had seen life for the circus that it could be, and not the sideshow that it was. He saw it for his dreams and goals, and not the top that he had reached, the plateau that marked the highest point, the wall that had been hit and could not be scaled.

And as time had passed by, he noticed his friends dropping away, dwindling in number. Even the ones he'd had for seemingly forever-however rare they were, he'd managed to push away to an arms length. He saw Wilson dropping further and further into the background, and he knew he was to blame, that somewhere, he had changed. He wasn't sure if it was the infarction, or if it was the rehab, or getting shot, or electrocuting himself, but he had changed somewhere during his life.

He was still changing, everyone always was. Everyone was coming up with new lies when the world broke them in different places. Everyone was coming up with new ways to fool themselves, to fool others. To hide their shortcomings and present their best face to the world, presenting the other cheek to be slapped by reality.

The world broke everyone, and those it could not break, it killed. And Gregory House didn't know what life was-he'd never had a chance to live it. But he knew that he was too stubborn to let the world break him entirely. He was going to let the world kill him, because he would not break. He'd keep dealing with life's illusions, and the illusion of life, not knowing what it was at all, but knowing, having looked at it from both sides-winner and loser, up, down, and still, that he was too stubborn to let it go.


End file.
